Review of last week Yule’s definition (6 features) of language Grammar: the sounds and sound patterns, the basic
units of meaning, such as words, and the rules that areused to combine them to form new sentences.
Prescriptive vs. descriptive rules of language Performance vs. competence
What does your mental grammar model?
Grammaticality judgments Universal grammar and the Innateness Hypothesis Universal vs. language-specific rules Different fields of linguistics
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Morphology Morpheme: one or more sounds combined and
associated, arbitrarily, with a consistent meaning. How many morphemes the words nicer, baker,
water (we’ll come back to this)
Lexicon: our mental list of words and what weknow about them including: meaning, pronunciation, lexical category (parts of
speech, or grammatical category information), andthe rules for expanding the word and creatingrelated words
Orthography (written form of the word) only if literate3
Love is… a manysplendored thing
Noun (with an article)"An Everlasting Love" ~ Andy GibbMy Love Is Your Love ~ Whitney HoustonHer Love Is Innocence ~ Devotchkas
Noun (with a preposition)"A Big Hunk O' Love" ~ Elvis Presley"Accidentally In Love" ~ Counting Crows"Addicted to Love" ~ Robert Palmer
Verb"And I Love Her" ~ The Beatles"And I Love You So" ~ Perry Como"As Long As You Love Me" ~ Backstreet Boys"A Time To Love" ~ Stevie Wonder
???"Avenue Of Stars" ~ Jennifer Love Hewitt 4
Arbitrary relation between sound &meaning, shown by:
Homophones: different words with thesame sounds bare, bear
Synonyms: different words, differentsounds, same meaning couch, chesterfield, davenport, sofa
5
Content vs. Function words Content words are an open class — we can,
and do, add new words to this class all the time. Verbs: take -ed, -ing, -s (with subcategories) Nouns: have number, case (i.e. English possessive,
gendered pronouns) Adjectives: degrees of comparison, agreement Adverbs: hard to recognize, can modify verb,
adjective, adverb, sentence Function words are a closed class
Adposition: prepositions and postpositions Article/determiner: a, an, the Pronoun: personal, demonstrative, interrogative,
relative, indefinite Conjunction
In-class exercise
Give five new words that have been created inyour lifetime, and their lexical categories
1: blog (noun)2: bootylicious (adjective)3: google (verb, noun)4: bling (noun)5: download (noun, verb)
• These are all content words!• Content and function words have differences in
creativity, how we process them, and how welearn them (content words first)
The “F” test (pg. 38)
FINISHED FILES ARE THE
RESULT OF YEARS OF
SCIENTIFIC STUDY
COMBINED WITH THE
EXPERIENCE OF YEARS
The “F” test (pg. 38)
FINISHED FILES ARE THE
RESULT OF YEARS OF
SCIENTIFIC STUDY
COMBINED WITH THE
EXPERIENCE OF YEARS
Discreteness in language, shown bymorphological structure. Morphology: the study of the internal structure
of words and the rules by which words areformed. A single word can have more than one morpheme
Morphemes… are discrete units of language. are the smallest meaningful units of language.
They cannot be subdivided. add meaning to a word. can appear in many different words can have any number of syllables
10
Types of morphemes Free morphemes can be a word by themselves. (i.e.,
king, berry, kick) Bound morphemes must be attached to another
morpheme (i.e. Affixes: prefix, suffix, infix, circumfix) Prefixes: misrepresent, endanger, inconvenience Suffixes: kindness, loosely, larger, running, dogs In languages other than English? Tabáa Zapotec (in Oaxaca, southern Mexico). Pluralization
indicated only by a verbal prefix, for subjects. Pronouns areambiguously singular or plural.dxe-le'e -nä’ dxe-le-le'e -nä’cont-see 3p. cont-PL-see 3p.“s/he sees” “they see”
(http://www.sil.org/mexico/zapoteca/g025b-zapotecplurals.htm)
InfixesBontocNoun/Adjective Verbfikas 'strong' fumikas 'to be strong'kilad 'red' kumilad 'to be red'fusul 'enemy' fumusul 'to be an enemy'
Tagalog (Philippines)gulay 'greenish vegetables’g+in+ulay 'greenish blue'
An English infix? un-freaking-believeble (limited productivity)
CircumfixesCircumfixes in Chickasaw (Muskogean language spoken in Oklahoma)
Declarative Negativechokma 'he is good' ikchokmo 'he isn't good'lakna 'it is yellow' iklakno 'it isn't yellow'palli 'it is hot’ ikpallo 'it isn't hot'tiwwi 'he opens it' iktiwwo 'he doesn't open it'
Samoanfinau 'to quarrel’ fe+finau+aʔi 'to quarrel with each other’
Dutch verbal morphologyRoot Infinitive Past Participle Glosswandel wandelen gewandeld 'walk'duw duwen geduwd 'push'zag zagen gezagd 'saw'Stofsuig stofsuigen gestofsuigd 'vacuum’
Root: the content morpheme, to whichsomething attaches
Stem or base: a root that has been combined with an affix Free root: able to occur alone as a word by itself e.g. chair, king,
judge, kick Bound root: can never occur alone as whole words, e.g. huckle-,
cran-, boysen- book calls these “huckles and cieves” have no meaning in isolation but acquire meaning once they’ve been
combined with other, specific morphemes. Etymemes: bound morphemes like –ceive and –mit
no longer have a meaning that we understand in isolation found in a lot of English words
Two morphemes that are pronounced (and even spelled) identicallymight not have the same meaning. The meaning of a morphememust be constant. nic+er, bak+er, water? How many -er morphemes? Two (-er in water not
separate morpheme) All morphemes are bound or free. Affixes are bound morphemes.
Root morphemes can be bound or free.
Rules of word formation Derivational morphemes
can be added to words to make new words, whichmay have different meaning or grammatical class.
These morphemes are productive. Examples?
Heirarchical structure Morphemes must be added in a fixed order. A word
has an internal structure, and isn’t simply a sequenceof morphemes.
“unsystematic”un+[system+atic] vs. *[un+system] + atic
English system not the same as languages like Arabic orHebrew, which use interdigitation (see pg. 44).- Arabic root s-l-m ‘peace’, root of words Islam, salaam
Tree and bracket diagrams
Bracket diagram [un+[system noun, root + atic]adjective, stem ]adjective
Tree diagram adjectiveunsystematic
adjective systematic
prefix noun (root) suffixun + system + atic
Ambiguous structures
un+lock+able two different un- prefixes (morphemes)
un- meaning not un- meaning to reverse the results of a specified action
[un + [[lock ]noun, root + able]adjective, stem ]adjective
Meaning? not lockable
[[un + [lock ]verb, root ]verb, stem + able]adjective
Meaning? able to be unlocked
Selectional restrictions on affixes
two different un- prefixes un- meaning not
- generally only attaches to adjectives (and some nouns)- cannot attach to verbs- kind/unkind, happy/unhappy: “not kind, not happy”- but not wash/*unwash: “not wash”, stop/*unstop: “not stop”- undo ≠ “not do”
un- meaning to reverse the results of a specified action- undo = reverse the action of doing
Suffix -able Attaches to verbs to form adjectives: stoppable, doable Can’t attach to adjectives: *kindable, *happyable
Selectional restrictions on affixes
unusable — how to diagram this? Two ways?No, only one:
[un + [[use]verb, root + able]adjective, stem ]adjective
Meaning? not usable
*[[un + [use]verb, root ]verb, stem + able]adjective
Meaning? *able to be unused (*unuse + -able)
Selectional restrictions on affixes
Prefixes re-, meaning “again, or return to aprevious condition” only attaches to verbs
- redo, reuse, *rehappy, *rekind- cannot attach to useable (adj.)- can attach to use (v.)- only one possible structure for the word
[re + [use]verb, root ]verb
Meaning? to use again
[[re + [use]verb, root ]verb, stem + able]adjective
Meaning? able to be used again
Inflectional morphology
Inflectional morphemes: mark tense, number, gender, case, degree (on
adj.)... agreement don't add lexical information Inflectional affixes never change the syntactic
category of what they're attached to Always attach to complete words (not to
something like huckle- or -able.)
English Inflectional morphemes
English has only eight inflectional morphemes. What arethey? third person singular present –s past tense –ed progressive –ing past participle –en plural –s possessive –‘s comparative –er superlative –es
irregular = suppletive, also what your book callsexceptions
English Inflectional morphemes
In English, inflectional forms are added afterderivational ones. un+like+ly+hood +s *un+like+ly+s+hood hierarchic order, not linear
Morphology vs. Syntax
Languages differ in whether they use morphology orsyntax for certain grammatical constructions / relationships Case
- English uses both (see examples on p. 66):
the queen of England/England’s Queen (genetive).
- Russian (see examples on p. 67) “Maxim defends Victor”:
Makism zasčisčajet Viktora.Makism Viktora zasčisčajet.Viktora Makism zasčisčajet.Viktora zasčisčajet Makism.Zasčisčajet Makism Viktora.Zasčisčajet Viktora Makism.
Identifying morphemes
Zulu data for exercise, pg. 73 #5 (answers on pg. 666)umfazi “married woman” abafazi“married women”umfani “boy” abafani “boys”umzali “parent” abazali “parents”umfundisi “teacher” abafundisi “teachers”umbazi “carver” ababazi “carvers”umlimi “farmer” abalimi “farmers”umdlali “player” abadlali “players”umfundi “reader” abafundi “readers”
fundisa “to teach” funda “to read”lima “to cultivate” baza “to carve”
Word coinage (making new words) Derivation Compounding
Syntactic compounds Lexical compounds
Acronym Initialism Blend Clipping/abbreviation Back-formation Hypocorism Inventing Eponyms Conversion
Functional shift vs. semantic shift vs. generification Borrowing
More exercises at end of chapter: #8 Swahili (answers in book pg. 667, long but very systematic) #9 Samoan (for more practice) #13 Inuktitut (for more practice)
HW for Monday/Tuesday Sept. 21–22 is: Fromkin textbook (Chapter 2), #1, #3, #4, three other exercises. The entire assignment is posted as a downloadable PDF on Blackboard
under the “Course Documents” tab in the Week 2 folder. The file is alsolinked on the syllabus in “Course Information”